90 Matching Annotations
  1. Nov 2023
  2. Dec 2022
  3. May 2022
    1. Projects like the Open Journal System, Manifold or Scalar are based on a distributed model that allow anyone to download and deploy the software (Maxwell et al., 2019), offering an alternative to the commercial entities that dominate the scholarly communication ecosystem.

      Might Hypothes.is also be included with this list? Though it could go a bit further toward packaging and making it more easily available to self-hosters.

    1. Having been printed on paper since the very first scientific journal was inaugurated in 1665

      There is some history here. The first scientific journal was one that published the proceedings of one of the first scholarly society meetings (The (mostly true) origins of the scientific journal - Scientific American Blog Network) and resulting letters.

  4. Mar 2022
    1. trust that research processes generate valid, useful knowledge and evidence that caninform practice and decision-making both within the HE context and in society morebroadly.

      There is also an intersection here with the long-standing problems with for-profit corporate interests in the scholarly communication chain that are probably not addressed in this article.

  5. Jul 2021
  6. May 2020
  7. Apr 2020
  8. Jun 2019
    1. So this is where some older paths-not-taken, such as Ted Nelson’s original many-to-many, multidirectional model for hypertext, and some more recent potential paths, such as Herbert van de Sompel’s decentralized, distributed vision for scholarly communication, might come in.
  9. Jan 2019
    1. Most progress will instead occur as annotations on the article text. Articles already contain live links to referenced articles, and future annotations could, for example, indicate the level of support for a particular point, or flag citations to retracted articles.

      Wonderful to see thinking in this direction. I'm thinking many layers of annotations for different purposes--both human and machine readable.

  10. Aug 2017
    1. the actual problem to be addressed is not the website itself. It is instead the structure of the current academic publishing and knowledge dissemination system that led to the creation, popularisation, and widespread use of Sci-Hub.

      The actual publishing model is systematic of a change in scholarship

  11. Apr 2017
    1. The venerableLISTSERV email lists such as mediev-l (founded in 1992) and other medieval-focusedlistservs are early instances of the digital democratization of scholarship, conducted as anasynchronous and geographically dispersed conversation.

      Listservs and their relationship to Notes and Queries

    2. firstwant to consider the ways in which our increased online presence has exposed manyof the existing networks that ground the sources of academic and intellectual authority(reputation, credibility, reliability).

      How online communities have changed the way humanists work.

    3. Fisher, Matthew. 2012. “Authority, Interoperability, and Digital Medieval Scholarship.” Literature Compass 9 (12): 955–64. doi:10.1111/lic3.12018.

      /home/dan/.mozilla/firefox/rwihx4ee.default/zotero/storage/PHS4P7D6/Fisher - 2012 - Authority, Interoperability, and Digital Medieval .pdf

    1. pp. 6-7 Interesting history of Journal

      Scholars have always had a need to communicate with other scholars. More than three hundred years ago, using the then new technology of the printing press, scholarly journals began. Journals were an exceptionally practical solution to the problem of the limited technolgogies of the time. ... For an individual before the seventeenth century the only practical form of communicating over significant distances was the personal letter. In comparison, scholarly journals allowed an individual to communicate more easily and exchange ideas with groups of others. These early journals were not seen as the final destination of a scholar's work; until this century, the monograph (book) was usually the final destination of a scholar's work. I find this distinction important because when a scholar today commits to be published in a journal, the product is usually considered finished and the scholar commits her or himself to the finality of the work. The journal article becomes the final piece offered to the public and to the fate of history.

    1. Together, these twin pressures—the need to enhance the ties between scholars and their organizations while simultaneously doing more with less —begin to suggest that the traditional value proposition of the scholarly society, in which one becomes a member in order to receive the various communications of the society, is no longer as viable as it once was. But there isn’t a clear sense, as yet, of where the society’s value for its members today, not to mention its sources of revenue that allow it to fulfill its mission, might lie. In order to find a way forward, today’s scholarly societies must begin to think differently about their functions, their structures, and their overall goals.

      CHanging roles of scholarly societies

    2. The letters that were exchanged among the membership of the Royal Society in the mid-17th century, and that were later gathered into journals, gradually accrued formalized processes of review, editing, production, and distribution. In creating this new product —the scholarly journal—learned societies found one part of the financial model that would allow them to serve their larger goals. Scholars were encouraged to join and maintain their memberships in order to receive the journal. In addition to memberships made available to individuals, journal subscriptions were created for libraries, allowing academic institutions to help support the organizations that facilitated, validated, and circulated the work of their faculty members.

      History of journals from letters

    1. he web was, like scholarly societies, invented for the express purpose of supporting communication amongst researchers by allowing them to create pages on which they could share their work with one another and with the world. The difference, of course, is that the web permits any individual scholar with server access and a little bit of technical knowledge to share their work directly and immediately further diminishing their apparent need for those collectives that scholarly societies have historically provided.

      How the web is like and not like traditional societies

    2. Since the Royal Society of London, learned and professional societies have been created precisely in order to help facilitate communication amongst members, scholars, and between those members and the broader intellectual world. Now, early on that communication took place via meetings and letters that were sent among the membership between meetings. Over time, the meetings developed into regularly scheduled conferences, and the letters were gathered into systematically produced and distributed journals. Those journals accrued a series of formal publishing processes including, of course, editing and peer review that came to mark them as authoritative resources for developing knowledge in their fields, and those resources came not only to be valued by their original audience, the members of the society, but also by a broader range of scholars, researchers, and students. As a result, research libraries collected those journals and made them available to their patrons

      History of Scholarly Societies from networking centres through conferences through publishers

    3. It could if we had more gold, but I am here to tell you that we do not. The boom Brandon just mentioned in the sciences has passed us by. ACLS funds a lot of scholarship, and we award $15 million in fellowship and grants, but if recipients of our fellowships use stipends to pay author fees that would be trading publication costs for research time. The National Endowment for Humanities, its funding is now 29% of its peak appropriation, and an additional 49% cut has been proposed, and the House Budget Committee is considering complete elimination of all funding. If the author pays model were widely adopted in the humanities, it would increase the already problematical level of inequality in academia. Wealthy universities could pay for their faculty but scholars at public universities and smaller colleges could not expect such largesse.

      Why APC doesn't work in the humanities

    4. They were created to name and claim an area of knowledge and to establish and monitor standards for cultivating that area. Establishing a peer-review journal was the most obvious way of doing that but there are many other ways. Prizes for books and articles, even the elections of officers themselves. Most humanities journals have two types of peer review: prepublication review of research articles and postpublication review of books and other published materials.

      Modern scholarly societies in the humanites were created to provide peer review

    5. William Rainey Harper, the first president of the nascent University of Chicago, was aggressive in recruiting star faculty to his new campus. He would offer blandishments including one relevant to our topic this morning. If Harper really wanted someone, the president would promise the wavering scholar that he, and it was almost always a “he” in those days, would be the editor of not one but two new journals that the university press would publish: one, a journal for academic specialists, and the second, for the general public.

      How U of C used journal editorships--of scholarly and public--as recruitment tool in setting up the U of Chicago.

  12. Mar 2017
    1. Commentator Kat Nagel outlined a life cycle that every list seems to go through. First thereis initial enthusiasm and evangelism (where people complain about the infrequency ofpostings). This is followed by a period of growth and then community (with lots of threadsand information and willingness to help). When the number of messages increases both involume and in diversity, a certain discomfort arises (often marked by complaints that the listhas lost its central purpose). Finally, if a group of purists emerges and is allowed to ‘‘flame’’(attack ad hominem) and act self-righteously, while others leave to form groups of their own,then a complacency develops, or worse stagnation and death. If, however, the self-righteousare minimized and a balance develops between community and diversity, then a list will reachmaturity

      Life cycle of the listserv

    2. The depth of interactivity varies widely among discussion groups. Some groups are likecocktail parties with many conversations (threads) competing. Some, like formal seminars,focus around specific topics. Some are like notice boards in the local grocery store wheremessages are pinned and left for others to read and comment on. And some groups merelyfunction as newspapers, disseminating electronic journals or computer programs, advertisingconferences or job vacancies. Many people are content to just read and listen, even in themost interactive groups, while a relatively few dominate conversations

      Different kinds of listserv groups

    3. In some ways, the exchange of correspondence publicly over these networksconstitutes a new form of publication. The posting on a list frequently resembles a letter to theeditor where someone conveys their opinions on a subjec

      A way of understanding listservs as a new form of scholarly communication--like a letter to the editor.

  13. Jan 2017
  14. Aug 2016
    1. Page XVIII

      Borgman notes that no social framework exist for data that is comparable to this framework that exist for analysis. CF. Kitchen 2014 who argues that pre-big data, we privileged analysis over data to the point that we threw away the data after words . This is what creates the holes in our archives.

      He wonders capabilities [of the data management] must be compared to the remarkably stable scholarly communication system in which they exist. The reward system continues to be based on publishing journal articles, books, and conference papers. Peer-reviewed legitimizes scholarly work. Competition and cooperation are carefully balanced. The means by which scholarly publishing occurs is an unstable state, but the basic functions remained relatively unchanged. while capturing and managing the "data deluge" is a major driver of the scholarly infrastructure developments, no Showshow same framework for data exist that is comparable to that for publishing.

  15. Jul 2016
    1. Page 203

      Citation age of an average article is longest in the social sciences.

    2. Page 202

      Borgman on information artifacts in the social sciences

      like the sciences, the social sciences create and use minimal information. Yet they differ in the sources of the data. While almost all scientific data are created by for scientific purposes, a significant portion of social scientific data consists of records credit for other purposes, by other parties.

    3. Page 184

      In the section “Description and Organization in the Sciences” Borgman discusses some of the ways in which scientific literature is better organized: for example these include uniform language, taxonomies, thesauri, and ontologies.

    4. Borgman, Christine L. 2007. Scholarship in the Digital Age: Information, Infrastructure, and the Internet. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.

      My notes

    5. page 182

      the sciences create a variety of objects the salt in the gray area between documents and data. Examples include Laboratorio field notebooks, slicer talks, composition objects such as graphic visualization of data. Laboratorio notebooks are often classified as data because their records research. Slides from talks, which were once ephemeral forms of communication, now our compost and competent person websites are distributed to accomplish proceedings. Graphic visualization data can be linked to scarlet documents to report research or to the underlying data.

    6. Chapter 8 is an excellent overview of the nature of the commons its differences and similarities

    7. Page 182 Borgman on the disciplinary differences in scholarly practice

      Despite many common activities, both the artifacts and practices of scholarship very by discipline. The artifacts very as scholars make choices about the sources of data, along with what, when, where, and what form to disseminate the products of their work. Scholarly practices vary in the way that scholars create, use, and share documents, data, and other forms of information.

    8. Pages 153 and 154

      Borgman on how data Deluge affects the balance between traditional and new forms of scholarship

      Changes in scholarly practices such as mining data sets can have significant influences on scholar is professional identity. Shifts in technology and funding that favor computational methods May disadvantage those whose research is based on fieldwork for instance. These transitions can create a double bind for those research areas more funding for computational modeling made me less funding for field research to collect new data. Not only does less data collected but fewer students are trained in field methods. Substantial expertise and data collection and the ability to interpret older data may be lost. Conversely those who rely on computational methods must have sufficient knowledge of how the data were collected to be able to interpret them. They do require adequate training and data collection methods.... Research Specialties that use more computational methods are seeking a balance between a steady supply of new data, avoiding duplicate or redundant data collection where possible, and training students in field research and computational methods. Thus, new technologies for producing and analyzing data may have subtle but important influences on Scholars career path.

    9. Page 115

      Borgman makes the point here that while there is a Commons in the infrastructure of scholarly publishing there is less of a Commons in the infrastructure 4 data across disciplines.

      The infrastructure of scholarly publishing Bridges disciplines: every field produces Journal articles, conference papers, and books albeit in differing ratios. Libraries select, collect organize and make accessible publications of all types, from all fields. No comparable infrastructure exists for data. A few Fields have major mechanisms for publishing data in repositories. Some fields are in the stage of developing standards and practices to activate their data resorces and Nathan were widely accessible. In most Fields, especially Outside The Sciences, data practices remain local idiosyncratic, and oriented to current usage rather than preservation operation, and access. Most data collections Dash where they exist Dash are managed by individual agencies within disciplines, rather than by libraries are archives. Data managers usually are trained within the disciplines they serve. Only a few degree programs and information studies include courses on data management. The lack of infrastructure for data amplifies the discontinuities in scholarly publishing despite common concerns, independent debates continue about access to Publications and data.

    10. Chapters 4 and 5 the continuity of scholarly publishing and the discontinuity of scholarly publishing

      These are both useful and important chapters for the scholarly Commons working group. They discuss the things that are common across scholarly communication as well as the different functions comma and they also discuss a new technology is disrupting this common area.

    11. Page 47

      Communication is the essence of scholarship comment as many observers have said in many ways.

      Borgman gives bibliography of claims that scholarship is communication

    12. A great paragraph here on the value of interconnection

      scholarly data and documents are of most value when they are interconnected rather than independent. The outcomes of a research project could be understood most fully if it were possible to trace an important finding from a grant proposal, to data collection, to a data set, to its publication, to its subsequent review and comment period journal articles are more valuable if one can jump directly from the article to those insights into later articles that cite the source article. Articles are even more valuable if they provide links to data on which they are based. Some of these capabilities already are available, but their expansion depends more on the consistency of the data description, access arrangements, and intellectual property agreement then on technological advances.

      I think here of the line from Jim Gill may all your problems be technical

    1. Figure 3 illustrates at what age ceased ‘indie’ journals stopped publishing. Most journals survived the first 2–5 years period, whereas the mortality rate rose in the critical 6–9 years period. After that, the number of journals ceasing dropped sharply, indicating that the surviving journals had found stability.

      Most critical period for journals is 6-9 years. After year ten, the number of journals that stop drops quickly

    2. The development over time of active ‘indie’ OA journals before and after 2002 is shown in Figs. 1A and 1B. A journal was counted as ‘active’ in a particular year if it was still publishing articles in that year. Before 2002 the number of active journals grew very rapidly from a total of 76 journals in 1995 to 207 journals in 2002. The year 2002 was the cut-off year to be included in the studied cohort, meaning that no new journals were added to the data set after this point in time. After 2002, the number of journals in the cohort decreased steadily to the 127 that stayed active in 2014.

      Interesting charts showing the rise and then decline of independent, scholar-published OA journals

    3. The average number of articles published was 31 per year with 74% publishing 0–30 articles, and 9% 60 or more. The study also contains interesting data about the workload done, revenues etc.

      Average numbers of articles in OJS journals: 31

      • 74% publish 0-30
      • 9% 60 or more
    4. “The key question for OA publishing is whether it can be scaled up from a single journal publishing model with relatively few articles published per year to a comprehensive major journal with of the order of 50–100 articles annually.” They further note: “The continuation of the journal relies very heavily on the personal involvement of the editor and is as such a risk to the model. Employing staff to handle, for example, management, layout and copyediting tasks, is a cost-increasing factor that also is a threat to the model.” Both questions are still highly relevant today.

      Key issues facing scholar-published journals: can they ramp up; can they survive succession.

    5. Earlier studies A number of previous studies, both snapshots and some with longitudinal elements, have shed light on different aspects of such type of journals, which for short we will call “indie” journals.

      Bibliography of "independent journals"

    6. Often the enthusiasm of the founders and their personal network can carry a volunteer-based journal for a few years. But at that same time this type of journal, which lack the support of employed staff and a professional publishing organization, are threatened by many dangers. The editor may change affiliation or retire, or the support of the university hosting the journal might be withdrawn. Authors may stop sending in good manuscripts and it may become more and more difficult to find motivated reviewers. Not being included in the Web of Science, and the impact factor that follows, may in the long run limit the number of submissions severely. On the positive side of the balance the emergence of open source software for publishing (i.e., Open Journals System) and cheap or free hosting services like Latin American Scielo have facilitated the technical parts of publishing.

      Problems with Scholar-published journals

    7. Most of the OA journals founded in the 1990s were of this variety, later many established subscription journals (particularly society ones) have made their digital versions freely available immediately or with a delay. This has been particularly noticeable in countries where cheap or free national or regional electronic portals have become available, like Scielo, Redalyc, and J-stage. Since around 2003 the OA market has become increasingly dominated by professionally published journals, which finance themselves by charging authors so-called article processing charges, APCs. At first such journals were being launched by open access publishers like BioMedCentral and PLOS, but in the last couple of years the major commercial and society publishers have increasingly started new OA journals and have also converted some subscription journals to APC-financed models.

      History of OA journals. Initially scholar-published, non-APC, post 2003 mostly APC-publisher-led journals

    8. Open Access (OA) is nowadays increasingly being used as a business model for the publishing of scholarly peer reviewed journals, both by specialized OA publishing companies and major, predominantly subscription-based publishers. However, in the early days of the web OA journals were mainly founded by independent academics, who were dissatisfied with the predominant print and subscription paradigm and wanted to test the opportunities offered by the new medium. There is still an on-going debate about how OA journals should be operated, and the volunteer model used by many such ‘indie’ journals has been proposed as a viable alternative to the model adopted by big professional publishers where publishing activities are funded by authors paying expensive article processing charges (APCs). Our longitudinal quantitative study of 250 ‘indie’ OA journals founded prior to 2002, showed that 51% of these journals were still in operation in 2014 and that the median number of articles published per year had risen from 11 to 18 among the survivors. Of these surviving journals, only 8% had started collecting APCs. A more detailed qualitative case study of five such journals provided insights into how such journals have tried to ensure the continuity and longevity of operations.

      Abstract

    9. A longitudinal study of independent scholar-published open access journals

      Björk, Bo-Christer, Cenyu Shen, and Mikael Laakso. 2016. “A Longitudinal Study of Independent Scholar-Published Open Access Journals.” PeerJ 4 (May). peerj.com: e1990. doi:10.7717/peerj.1990.

  16. Jun 2016
    1. Here is the real message of the letter and the real rationale of the Spenser Society of America: to multiply the institutional contexts in which writing on Spenser will at once be demanded and published. It so happens that the letter was written before the society's first meeting, but as this sentence shows, the society need never have met at all, since its most impor- tant goal-the creation of a Spenser industry with all its attendant machinery-had already been achieved

      The creation of the Spenser industry: how communities create fields

    1. Publish or perish? The rise of the fractional author…

      Plume, Andrew, and Daphne van Weijen. 2014. “Publish or Perish? The Rise of the Fractional Author….” Research Trends, no. 38(September). https://www.researchtrends.com/issue-38-september-2014/publish-or-perish-the-rise-of-the-fractional-author/.

    2. Some researchers attribute the phrase to Kimball C. Atwood III, who is said to have coined the phrase in 1950 (

      origin of the phrase "publish or perish"

  17. Apr 2016
    1. business

      Right: But where this argument fails is in interrogating whether, and why, this must necessarily be the case. Many socially necessary functions are provided outside market structures. Is there an iron law of nature dictating that scholarly communication must happen in a marketplace?

    1. in the latter both the wide differential in manuscript rejection rates and the high correlation between refereerecommendations and editorial decisions suggests that reviewers and editors agree more on acceptance than on rejection.

      In "specific and focussed" fields, the agreement tends to be more on acceptance than rejection.

    2. In the former there is also much more agreement on rejectionthan acceptance

      In "general and diffuse" fields, there is more agreement on paper rejection than in "specific and focussed."

    1. . I consider that my job, as a philosopher, is to activate the possible, and not to describe the probable, that is, to think situations with and through their unknowns when I can feel them

      The job of a philosopher is to "activate the possible, not describe the probable."

  18. Mar 2016
    1. Levine, T., Asada, K. J., & Carpenter, C. (2009). Sample sizes and effect sizes are negatively correlated inmeta-analyses: Evidence and implications of a publication bias against non-significant findings.Communication Monographs, 76, 286–302
    2. Paris, G., De Leo, G., Menozzi, P., & Gatto, M. (1998). Region-based citation bias in science.Nature, 396,6708
    3. Rosenthal, R. (1979). The file drawer problem and tolerance for null results.Psychological Bulletin, 86,638–641

      p

    4. Song, F. J., Parekh-Bhurke, S., Hooper, L., Loke, Y. K., Ryder, J. J., Sutton, A. J., et al. (2009). Extent ofpublication bias in different categories of research cohorts: A meta-analysis of empirical studies.BMCMedical Research Methodology, 9, 79
    5. Sterling, T. D. (1959). Publication decisions and their possible effects on inferences drawn from tests ofsignificance—Or vice versa.Journal of the American Statistical Association, 54, 30–34

      publication bias

    1. Osuna, C., Crux-Castro, L., & Sanz-Menedez, L. (2011). Overturning some assumptions about the effects ofevaluation systems on publication performance.Scientometrics, 86, 575–592

      evaluation systems and publication performance

    2. Pautasso, M. (2010). Worsening file-drawer problem in the abstracts of natural, medical and social sciencedatabases.Scientometrics, 85(1), 193–202
    3. Schmidt, S. (2009). Shall we really do it again? The powerful concept of replication is neglected in thesocial sciences.Review of General Psychology, 13(2), 90–100.
    4. Shelton, R. D., Foland, P., & Gorelskyy, R. (2009). Do new SCI journals have a different national bias?Scientometrics, 79(2), 351–363. doi:
    5. Silvertown, J., & McConway, K. J. (1997). Does ‘‘publication bias’’ lead to biased science?Oikos, 79(1),167–168.
    6. Yousefi-Nooraie, R., Shakiba, B., & Mortaz-Hejri, S. (2006). Country development and manuscript selec-tion bias: A review of published studies.BMC Medical Research Methodology, 6, 37

      On developing countries and science

    7. Evanschitzky, H., Baumgarth, C., Hubbard, R., & Armstrong, J. S. (2007). Replication research’s disturbingtrend.Journal of Business Research, 60(4), 411–415. doi

      replication research

    8. Jeng, M. (2006). A selected history of expectation bias in physics.American Journal of Physics, 74(7),578–583

      History of expectation bias in physics

    9. Ioannidis, J. P. A. (2008a). Perfect study, poor evidence: Interpretation of biases preceding study design.Seminars in Hematology, 45(3), 160–166

      effect of positive bias

    10. Feigenbaum, S., & Levy, D. M. (1996). Research bias: Some preliminary findings.Knowledge and Policy:The International Journal of Knowledge Transfer and Utilization, 9(2 & 3), 135–142.

      Positive bias

    11. Song, F., Parekh, S., Hooper, L., Loke, Y. K., Ryder, J., Sutton, A. J., et al. (2010). Dissemination andpublication of research findings: An updated review of related biases.Health Technology Assessment,14(8), 1–193. doi

      positive bias

    12. De Rond, M., & Miller, A. N. (2005). Publish or perish—Bane or boon of academic life?Journal ofManagement Inquiry, 14(4), 321–329. doi:

      On how increased pressure to publish diminishes creativity.

    13. Several possible problems have been hypothesised, including: undue proliferation ofpublications and atomization of results (Gad-el-Hak2004; Statzner and Resh2010);impoverishment of research creativity, favouring ‘‘normal’’ science and predictable out-comes at the expense of pioneering, high-risk studies (De Rond and Miller2005); growingjournal rejection rates and bias against negative and non-significant results (because theyattract fewer readers and citations) (Statzner and Resh2010; Lortie1999); sensationalism,inflation and over-interpretation of results (Lortie1999; Atkin2002; Ioannidis2008b);increased prevalence of research bias and misconduct (Qiu2010). Indirect empiricalevidence supports at least some of these concerns. The per-capita paper output of scientistshas increased, whilst their career duration has decreased over the last 35 years in thephysical sciences (Fronczak et al.2007). Rejection rates of papers have increased in thehigh-tier journals (Larsen and von Ins2010; Lawrence2003). Negative sentences such as‘‘non-significant difference’’ have decreased in frequency in papers’ abstracts, while catchyexpressions such as ‘‘paradigm shift’’ have increased in the titles (Pautasso2010; Atkin2002). No study, however, has yet verified directly whether the scientific literature isenduring actual changes in conten

      Good discussion (and bibliography) of problems involved in hyper competition

    14. Formann, A. K. (2008). Estimating the proportion of studies missing for meta-analysis due to publicationbias.Contemporary Clinical Trials, 29(5), 732–739. doi

      estimate of positive bias in clinical trials.

    15. Fronczak, P., Fronczak, A., & Holyst, J. A. (2007). Analysis of scientific productivity using maximumentropy principle and fluctuation-dissipation theorem.Physical Review E, 75(2), 026103. doi:10.1103/PhysRevE.75.026103.

      On rising scientific productivity over shorter careers.

    16. Atkin, P. A. (2002). A paradigm shift in the medical literature.British Medical Journal, 325(7378),1450–1451

      On the rise of sexy terms like "paradigm shift" in abstracts.

    17. Bonitz, M., & Scharnhorst, A. (2001). Competition in science and the Matthew core journals.Sciento-metrics, 51(1), 37–54

      Matthew effect

    1. To publish. And sometimes publish in the right journals.... In my discipline ...there’s just a few journals, and if you’re not in that journal, then yourpublication doesn’t really count

      Importance of "top" journals

    2. In addition to that, the other thing that they focus on is science as celebrity.... Sothe standards are, ‘‘How much did it cost, and is it in the news?’’ And if it didn’tcost much and if it is not in the news, but it got a lot of behind-the-scenes talkwithin your discipline, they don’t know that, nor do they care

      Importance of news-worthiness.

    3. You’ve got to have a billionpublications in my field. That is the bottom line. That’s the only thing that counts.You can fail to do everything else as long as you have lots and lots of papers

      Importance of publications in science--overrules everything else.

    1. The winner-take-all aspect of the priority rule has its drawbacks, however. It can encourage secrecy, sloppy practices, dishonesty and an excessive emphasis on surrogate measures of scientific quality, such as publication in high-impact journals. The editors of the journal Nature have recently exhorted scientists to take greater care in their work, citing poor reproducibility of published findings, errors in figures, improper controls, incomplete descriptions of methods and unsuitable statistical analyses as evidence of increasing sloppiness. (Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group.)As competition over reduced funding has increased markedly, these disadvantages of the priority rule may have begun to outweigh its benefits. Success rates for scientists applying for National Institutes of Health funding have recently reached an all-time low. As a result, we have seen a steep rise in unhealthy competition among scientists, accompanied by a dramatic proliferation in the number of scientific publications retracted because of fraud or error. Recent scandals in science are reminiscent of the doping problems in sports, in which disproportionately rich rewards going to winners has fostered cheating.

      How the priority rule is killing science.

    1. The role of external influences on the scientific enterprise must not be ignored. With funding success rates at historically low levels, scientists are under enormous pressure to produce high-impact publications and obtain research grants. The importance of these influences is reflected in the burgeoning literature on research misconduct, including surveys that suggest that approximately 2% of scientists admit to having fabricated, falsified, or inappropriately modified results at least once (24). A substantial proportion of instances of faculty misconduct involve misrepresentation of data in publications (61%) and grant applications (72%); only 3% of faculty misconduct involved neither publications nor grant applications.

      Importance of low funding rates as incitement to fraud

    2. The predominant economic system in science is “winner-take-all” (17, 18). Such a reward system has the benefit of promoting competition and the open communication of new discoveries but has many perverse effects on the scientific enterprise (19). The scientific misconduct among both male and female scientists observed in this study may well reflect a darker side of competition in science. That said, the preponderance of males committing research misconduct raises a number of interesting questions. The overrepresentation of males among scientists committing misconduct is evident, even against the backdrop of male overrepresentation among scientists, a disparity more pronounced at the highest academic ranks, a parallel with the so-called “leaky pipeline.” There are multiple factors contributing to the latter, and considerable attention has been paid to factors such as the unique challenges facing young female scientists balancing personal and career interests (20), as well as bias in hiring decisions by senior scientists, who are mostly male (21). It is quite possible that, in at least some cases, misconduct at high levels may contribute to attrition of woman from the senior ranks of academic researchers.

      Reason for fraud: winner take all

    1. Editors, Publishers, Impact Factors, and Reprint Income

      On the incentives for journal editors to publish papers they think might improve IF... and how citations are gamed.

  19. Feb 2016
    1. 44-45 Ingelfinger rule: won't publish articles that have been presented, discussed with reporters, or published in any form elsewhere--including data. Once a paper is under consideration and production, it can't be discussed with reporters.

      This clearly harms science in the interest of journals.

  20. Feb 2014
    1. National governments are also weighing in on the issue. The UK government aims this April to make text-mining for non-commercial purposes exempt from copyright, allowing academics to mine any content they have paid for.

      UK government intervening to make text-mining for non-commercial purposes exempt from copyright.

    2. “Our plan is just to wait for the copyright exemption to come into law in the United Kingdom so we can do our own content-mining our own way, on our own platform, with our own tools,” says Mounce. “Our project plans to mine Elsevier’s content, but we neither want nor need the restricted service they are announcing here.”

      This seems to be a sensible move rather than be hindered not by copyright, but by the onerous contract that Elsevier wants to put in place.

    3. some researchers feel that a dangerous precedent is being set. They argue that publishers wrongly characterize text-mining as an activity that requires extra rights to be granted by licence from a copyright holder, and they feel that computational reading should require no more permission than human reading. “The right to read is the right to mine,” says Ross Mounce of the University of Bath, UK, who is using content-mining to construct maps of species’ evolutionary relationships.

      "The right to read is the right to mine."